The Normandy landfill is Beirut’s new waterfront, an extension to the city’s territory that was reclaimed from the sea and filled with the processed debris of Lebanon’s civil war. For Solidere, the private real estate development company running the reconstruction of Beirut’s city center, it is yet another real estate speculation opportunity. With most of the Beirut Central District zoned and designed by international architects and/or imported design strategies, the city’s downtown area is now a failed post-war graft that is closer to an outdoor mall than to a downtown area; a vision of the city that might soon extend onto the virgin land of the Normandy landfill. Squeezed between the city and the sea, this still unbuilt area opens up the possibility for an alternative take on Beirut’s waterfront. Instead of thinking of the city as an international commodity, where its inhabitants are rendered an optional flavouring to the concept of an aesthetic metropolis. Solidere’s vision of a brighter future is a branded park of subjectively screened monuments designed by international architects. Ours is not.

‘Beirut field’ preserves the intrinsic characteristic of the Normandy landfill: an open space in the continuity of the corniche, Beirut’s densest public space. The project acts as a catalyser for the underestimated potentials and possibilities of the capital. It does not propose any specific function or use (such as a park, a square or a playground) because each of these intended uses creates a specific set of expectations and denies any other use of the space. Instead, ‘Beirut field’ generates a raw mineralized space, allowing spontaneous activities and vegetation to develop, leaving its uses open for negotiation, interpretation and imagination…’Beirut field’ intensifies the dynamics that we can already find in-situ and throughout the city.

NOTAN OFFICE is a Brussels based architecture and urban design practice. It relies on temporary associations between Frederic Karam and other architects, landscape architects, artists, urban planners, and more technical advisors. The idea is to adapt to every project that demands different knowhows and expertise; relying on this network to reinvent itself through every collaboration, each project taken from scratch, with new inputs for each contexts in attempts to find coherent answers with given budgets, contexts and geographical locations.

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